Simple Medicines: land, health, and power in the 19th-century Ojibwe western Great Lakes

Abstract

“Simple Medicines: Land, Health, and Power in the 19th-century Ojibwe western Great Lakes” is a cultural history of medicine in mixed Indigenous Ojibwe and settler communities in the western Great Lakes between 1823 and 1891. This dissertation demonstrates that the ways that settler American and Ojibwe communities understood and sought health fundamentally shaped the dynamic transformations of political, religious, economic, and environmental landscapes in nineteenth century Anishinaabewaki or Anishinaabe territories. The period of 1825-1891 marked the beginning of the US-Ojibwe political relations and a resulting sea change in Ojibwe territorial management, lifeways, and population. While Anishinaabewaki had been and remained a richly international space, American settler colonialism deeply marked Ojibwe people, Ojibwe communities, and Ojibwe land through treaties, reservations, assimilation, and allotment. This dissertation situates the enduring if often contradictory value of medical practices and discourses in settler and Ojibwe relations. Medicine was consistently part of US political relationships with Ojibwe nations through the nineteenth century although the sites in which medicine operated changed over time. These changes were interlinked. The American settler state used settler colonial medicine through treaties, annuities, federally supported missions, and federally supported Indian agencies. Through these technologies and infrastructures, the settler state promoted a vision of health that was assimilative and as such genocidal. Medical practices and discourses of health were deeply entangled with religious reform, economic expansion, and the acquisition of land. This story of medical practice and health discourse must also be read through a longstanding Ojibwe medical pluralism, in which medical exchanges acted to create political, economic, and social relationships while refracting powerful relations with material and immaterial more-than-humans including land. Ojibwe brought settlers into relation through medicine and other forms of gift exchange through which relationships were created, recognized, and maintained. Relationships as a medium extended between humans and more-than-humans including powerful material entities and immaterial entities. Relationships created health and healthy lives for Ojibwe as Ojibwe. Processes of alliance-building, and processes of alliance-destroying, were and are processes of health.